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RAMADI, Iraq - The U.S. Marine Corps wrapped nearly seven years in Iraq on Saturday, handing over duties to the Army and signaling the beginning of an accelerated withdrawal of American troops as the U.S. turns its focus away from the waning Iraqi war to a growing one in Afghanistan.

The Marines formally handed over control of Sunni-dominated Anbar, Iraq's largest province, to the Army during a ceremony at a base in Ramadi - where some of the fiercest fighting of the war took place.

If all goes as planned, the last remaining Marines will be followed out by tens of thousands of soldiers in the coming months. President Barack Obama has ordered all but 50,000 troops out of the country by Aug. 31, 2010, with most to depart after the March 7 parliamentary election.

The remaining troops will leave by the end of 2011 under a U.S.-Iraqi security pact.

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The United States must be Islamabad's "steadfast partner" against the Taliban in Pakistan, said Army Gen. David Petraeus, commander of U.S. Central Command.

"Our task - and [Defense] Secretary [Robert] Gates has reaffirmed that during his ongoing visit - has to be to show that we are going to be a steadfast partner, that we are not going to do to that country what we've done twice before, which is provide a substantial amount of assistance, in some cases create issues and challenges that they have to deal with in the future, like mujahideen, and then leave precipitously and leave them with those problems," Petraeus told an audience at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.

Petraeus said Pakistan has had successes recently in combating the Taliban, such as clearing and holding the Swat Valley.

He said the U.S. commitment was demonstrated by the Kerry-Lugar bill that passed last fall, which sends $1.5 billion annually to Pakistan for five years.

Petraeus said the United States would not be directly militarily involved with the fight inside Pakistan.

"They see this as their fight, and that is important," he said.

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SHOSHARAK, Afghanistan — If luck is the battlefield’s final arbiter — the wild card that can trump fitness, training, teamwork, equipment, character and skill — then Lance Cpl. Ryan T. Mathison experienced its purest and most welcome form.

On a Marine foot patrol here through the predawn chill of Friday morning, he stepped on a pressure-plate rigged to roughly 25 pounds of explosives. The device, enough to destroy a pickup truck or tear apart several men, was buried beneath him in the dusty soil.

It did not explode.

Lance Corporal Mathison’s weight triggered the detonation of one of the booby trap’s two blasting caps. But upon giving an audible pop and tossing small stones into the air, the device failed to ignite its fuller charge — a powerful mix of Eastern Bloc mortar rounds and homemade explosives spiked with motorcycle parts, rusty spark plugs and jagged chunks of steel.

Lance Corporal Mathison and several Marines near him were spared. So began a brief journey through the Taliban’s shifting tactics and the vagaries of war, where an experience at the edge of death became instead an affirmation of friendship, and in which a veteran Marine reluctantly assumed for a morning one of the infantry’s most coveted roles: that of the charmed man.

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Online mapping services are becoming increasingly popular and useful and, as a result of that, more profitable for those running them. All the big players are present in the space, Google, of course, which started it all, but also Yahoo and Microsoft. They each have their advantages, but what most people don't realize is that they all share pretty much the same mapping data, from the same providers. It's no surprise then that Google and Bing announced new satellite imagery on the very same day.

Google also introduced updated imagery, but it also announced that it was stepping up the update frequency. “Today, I'm happy to announce that we're increasing the frequency of our updates to bring you the world's freshest and most complete imagery,” Senior Geo Data Strategist Matt Manolides wrote. “As a part of this announcement, we're also making some changes to the way that we tell you about new imagery.”

The interesting part of the Google announcement doesn’t necessarily lie in the images themselves, but in the fact that it has increased the rate at which these updates will come. Along with this, Google has also changed the way it will present the new data by providing users with a link to preview it inside Google Earth, but also with an embedded Earth plugin.